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Researchers Sour on Vista Service Pack 1 Performance
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 23, 2007 12:42 PM
from the bit-of-a-bore dept.
from the bit-of-a-bore dept.
Stony Stevenson passed us a link indicating that a group of researchers has described Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as basically a performance dud. Researchers from the Devil Mountain Software group is claiming that a series of in-house benchmark tests showed that users hoping to receive a speed boost from the update will be disappointed. "Devil Mountain ran its DMS Clarity Studio framework on a laptop Barth described as a "barn burner" -- dual-core processor, dedicated graphics, and either 1GB or 2GB of memory -- to compare performance of the SP1 release candidate that Microsoft released last week with the RTM version that hit general distribution last January. The Vista RTM was not updated with any of the bug fixes, patches or performance packs that Microsoft has pushed through Windows Update since the operating system's debut. 'One gigabyte, 2GB [of memory], it didn't make a difference,' said [CTO Craig] Barth. 'SP1 was never more than 1% or 2% faster.'"
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More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor 428 comments
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."
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Straw Man? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Straw Man? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Straw Man? (Score:5, Informative)
No. It's fair to call a straw man when someone puts words in someone else's mouth and then defeats that argument. In this example, (I did not RTFA, nor anything else related to this btw)if Microsoft did not say anything about performance, but this group tore MS apart because of a lack of performance improvement, it would be a straw man because this group is attacking a claim MS never made. On the other hand, if MS did say performance would be improved, it wouldn't be. From what others have said, and my own personal expectations of this SP, this is probably a straw man. I wouldn't expect a service pack designed to fix security holes and other issues would by default improve performance significantly. Service packs are, generally, a roll up of all the previous security updates, plus any additional security or features they want to add.
An example from the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's fair to call a straw man when someone puts words in someone else's mouth and then defeats that argument.
Is it fair to try to divert attention away from an actual issue (Vista performance is terrible and is not improved by the latest service pack) to a stupid wankfest about whether Microsoft actually claimed they would improve the poor Vista performance? Either way, Vista performance is poor and not getting better.
Meanwhile, I hear the Walmart Green PC at $199 is selling like hotcakes, because it performs very well running Linux + Enlightenment. Perhaps this shows that people really do care about poor Vista
Re:Straw Man? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just Vista [blogspot.com] though. Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows Vista consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as Office 2000.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Straw Man? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you should google on logical fallacies. All that saying "straw man" means is that someone is making an argument against a claim that was never made. If Microsoft never claimed SP1 would improve performance, than it would truly be a "straw man" criticism to berate them because SP1 does not improve performance, and thus the "straw man" defense is valid. However, if MS *did* tout SP1 as improving performance, then the "straw man" accusation is invalid as the article would have a valid point in pointing out that performance gains appear to be dismal.
The guy who posted that MS *did* claim performance improvement makes an actual argument that the OP's "straw man" claim *is* invalid, which is perfectly fine. However, you are simply implying that *any* claim of "straw man" is a "diversion tactic", which is not.
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Re:Straw Man? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you see, *that* was good as far as an argument against the OP's claim of "straw man". You actually made an argument as to why the article is not making a straw man argument, with evidence to back it up, though it is extacly the same one the the first response from 'faloi'. Great, so far I agree with that, and I said as much.
But that was not *my* argument. My argument was that you can't simply deny any claim of "straw man" based solely upon your perception that it is often misused, which is where you started. And appropriately enough, that makes your last response to me......a "straw man" argument! To which I can only respond...refer to my previous post.
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Re:Straw Man? (Score:5, Funny)
Now this is a picture of Chewbacca.
...
Lookit the silly monkey.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Straw Man? (Score:5, Informative)
Performance
The following list describes some of the performance improvements that Windows Vista SP1 will include
Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release
version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
Improves performance of Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and
speeding JavaScript parsing.
Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain
computers.
Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTL-
ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares
consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.
Hmm, file shares are slow? Perhaps Microsoft should switch to Samba, which is fast.
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Samba is fast? (Score:3, Informative)
Are we shocked? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are we shocked? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Vista would have to re-animate the dead into blood thirsty zombies before it could rival the utter horror of ME.
Gosh, I sure wouldn't like to meet you.
Re:Are we shocked? (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone lend me a cricket bat, please?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Using a friend's laptop running vista, logged in as an administrator, trying to copy harmless files from a public folder on my mac to the my documents folder on vista was forbidden. I had to copy to my Win XP machine first and then from there to Vista. Once tried to use ipconfig
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are we shocked? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do use XP as my primary OS at home and at work and you bet I care. It ain't my spare car. It's my primary ride.
How is the parent modded as insightful? He's saying he doesn't give a shit because he hardly uses it.
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Re:Are we shocked? (Score:5, Interesting)
The slow file copy isn't a joke. We're talking 1hr+ to copy 2.5GB to a FW hard drive from internal SATA. That's about 25MB/min, 120 times slower than the peak speed of FW. I think you can get more out of a parallel port.
There are some nice additions. But it's not worth the trouble, as some of the flaws totally override those.
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Re:Are we shocked? (Score:4, Informative)
And yet another person who doesn't understand the new memory manager. High levels of allocated memory are a good thing for performance. Coding Horror [codinghorror.com] has a decent primer on all of this, but the short version of the story is that people who are used to how Windows has traditionally handled memory management rather than how an ideal memory manager should work love to complain about Vista being a memory hog when, in fact, I'd suggest that the Vista memory manager may arguably be one of the best out there right now.
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Re:Are we shocked? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the Lame Excuses List, this falls somewhere above "You can't take bottled water on an airplane or the terrorists might win" but still doesn't beat out "He only hits me because he loves me."
If the equivalents of "cp -r" and "cp -pr" take noticeably different amounts of time to complete on your operating system, something is broken, because a multi-gigahertz processor can finish fiddling with even complicated permission bits long before a 50MB/s disk needs to have them ready to write.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't see where all the Vista hate is coming from.
Vista is fine if you buy all-new hardware and all new software, and you make sure that the new stuff is Vista compatible. My experience with Vista has been okay, but there have been some expensive warts:
Optimization (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Optimization (Score:5, Funny)
+/*
40 million lines of DRM, WGA, Windows Media Ultra Control Restricted Mode Crap
+*/
Done!
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Re:Optimization (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither is something Microsoft is likely to do -- the first costs too much (including accepting incompatibilities and devising workarounds for them), and the second requires ace programmers, not run-off-the-mill visual-anything. Changing a few compiler flags here and there, or re-compiling with a new compiler version is cheap, but usually won't have much noticeable effect. However, it's what you're most likely to see from huge corporations.
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Re:Optimization (Score:5, Interesting)
The hard part is usually not the optimisation, it's working out where the optimisations need to go. This typically involves wading through huge amounts of data from profiling runs.
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Re:Optimization (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there was/is an issue, Vista just seems slow. In the former example, they wouldn't have seen the issue because something else would be slowing it down. But on a lesser machine, I'm wondering if the optimizations would have a more dramatic effect. I mean a machine where the memory or processor is limited and the actual execution of the code was keeping it slow. Will it allow the code to be executed faster on a processor that is maxed out all the time?
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Re:Optimization (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it DOES matter to Joe. Joe, however, won't call it "code optimization". Joe will simply say that "Vista runs slower than my XP did!" He doesn't care WHY it's so, but even Joe can tell the difference in speed.
We have a lot of Joes come through our shop. They notice.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most end users who are not power users don't really see the sluggishness unless it gets real bad.
Case in point is look at the spyware apps. I can tell when they are running on a persons computer , but they can't they just think windows got slower, when we realize something is wrong they just keep using.
I have a family friend who bought a debranded refurbed HP box , cheap and with a
Standard reply from most vendors is... (Score:4, Funny)
Game over man!! (Score:5, Funny)
Has it ever improved efficiency? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without wishing to troll, when has a Window service pack ever improved the speed of a Windows OS?
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
I've found in my rather short development career is something scarily similar to the first law of thermodynamics: "Bad code once created can never be destroyed." In most commercial situations, the risk of breaking a routine far outweighs the benefit the change brings.
We've built an entire area of study, refactoring, on trying to sell the importance of keeping code clean. I'm still not 100% convinced that the case for refactoring has been made. If you spend three months refactoring, is the simpler overall structure really going to speed up development sufficiently to justify the capital outlay? In all but the very worst code-bases, the answer is unclear.Bear in mind, refactoring my cause you to notice bugs that you can't fix because it would break an interface. Now your code has to be badly structured to support this bad business logic. This can be enough to render the effort useless.
This is why service packs rarely improve functionality or performance. Windows XP SP2 is a notable exception. The risk is simply too great.
Simon
Why I even care one bit (Score:5, Interesting)
So I notice Crysis has a "Very High" setting that's disabled for me in XP. Ok, I think, the first half or so of the game runs ok with High settings, so maybe it might just barely be playable on Very High. Just to be able to see what it looks like.
I boot into Vista and install the game there. Lo and behold, it runs at almost exactly half the FPS on High compared to in XP. Had to drop it to Medium to be even remotely playable. Needless to say, Very High is what I'd need to be to enjoy it with everything at max.
Is the culprit crap drivers for my hardware, general performance drain by Vista, or DRM using everything it can to make sure I'm actually allowed to use the computer today? I don't know, but I do know Vista has made me seriously try a Linux on a desktop for the first time (only used it for servers until now). If only more games supported it, or ran under Wine, I'd be happy as can be.
Re:DX10 (Score:3, Insightful)
"DX10. It's inevitable that games will eventually require it"
Why? To get an extra 10 fps? The normal hardware upgrade cycle will fix that, and let game manufacturers continue to ship with DX9. Heck, there are still games being sold that run fine under Win9x.
As Nintendo showed, its not necessary to require the latest and greatest hardware to have the best product.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, I can confirm for you, yep Vista sucked for me too, same driver versions, fully patched machines and the Vista install has several bullshit disk thrash services disabled, it still ran at 34 FPS avg in the benchmark at X settings.
XP ran at 45 FPS avg, same system, same benchmark and settings.
Also the "DX10" features in Vista ARE available in XP with some ini hacking, do a google on it, I think DIGG covered it.
Vista, more like shitsta.
How to "speed up" Vista (Score:5, Informative)
Turn off: Volume Shadow Copy (files won't be versioned automatically any more), indexing service (rapid searching won't work any more), and SuperFetch (apps wont be pre-loaded and so will start slower, but you'll have more "free memory" on average - a debatable benefit anyway).
You'll notice XP levels of disc activity (barely any) and lot's more free memory. That's because Vista's not doing anything. Personally, I like to be able to search instantly, have apps load instantly, and have my critical files backed up transparently; so I don't mind the "bloat".
Anyway, if you actually know how Windows works, you'll know what you don't want running and what you do. Turn off the stuff you don't want, but most people are fine with the defaults even if it means using more resources.
Re:How to "speed up" Vista (Score:4, Informative)
I agree...Black Viper [blackviper.com] to the rescue. I printed out his list of services for XP [blackviper.com] and still use it to this day when tweaking systems for friends/family.
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Re:How to "speed up" Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How to "speed up" Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fixed the headline for you (Score:5, Informative)
What is not a performance dud today? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a 50Mhz 486dx laptop with a 8megs of ram. What OS can I reasonable run on it besides DOS, baslinux (basic linux - damn small linux is to big). and some floppy based OSs like maybe if I can even QNX demo of i can even find it anymore? To bad I can't get AROS to run on it.
I also have an Amiga 4000 Toaster that runs at a warp engine speed of 28Mhz though I have more ram in it. and its still useful.
The point is, when it comes to OSs today the performance is pretty much a dud in a fair comparison to the better OSs of yesterday.
There has been a code bloat to use up increased speed, memory and storage in OSs today.
Today you can buy 1 gig thumb drives that could hold your whole system, personal files and duplicate backups of the same and still have plenty of room.
In fact, we should today have such sub-gig personal thumb drive based systems. Expecially considering what the more common applications are.
Performance sucks today, and its not just a windows bloatware matter.
Give up... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows is like "Star Trek" movies (Score:4, Funny)
Woo hoo (Score:3, Insightful)
The worst thing Microsoft has ever done was put Mickey Mouse in charge of kernel development. Letting Hollywood dictate the kernel design will prove to be the undoing of the Windows platform.
The missed point... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Some of the performance updates scheduled for SP1 were already released as Updates.
2) Performance on a System of 1GB (the sweet spot) will see virtually no improvement, and they are reviewing systems with 1GB and 2GB or more. If you baseline the performance difference on a 512mb system the performance difference is more dramatic.
3) There are also a few optimization that don't affect most users. Readyboost got a significant jump in how it improves performance, and there has been refining of Superfetch as well. This includes not only USB flash, but Solid State and hybrid Drives will see significant boosts.
4) File copying in RTM did have some performance problems but the majority of the problem was the screen not accurately reporting it was already copying files when it said 'calculating time', so SP1 gets about a 10% boost, but the dialog reports the process more accurately as well.
If Windows Update wasn't doing its job and the updates hadn't already been being released, SP1 would be more of a one time dramatic increase. Also they need to be looking at lower end system when testing if they want to see more SP1 improvements.
Finally, older and pre-Vista designed system configurations see more of a bump as well. If you test SP1 on a system that has the specific chipsets and HD Audio, etc that is designed for Vista, SP1 won't add a lot, as the system components were already designed and optimized for Vista.
Re:That's a release candidate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That's a release candidate (Score:5, Funny)
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Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
In closing, I think that there is no better time then RIGHT NOW to expand your skill-set to include Windows agnostic developing. Because I'm of the opinion that there is a huge shift happening in the market right now, just very slowly...
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